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  I sat alone thinking a lot about the past and understanding the frosty hearted child, Norma Jean. She would never have lived to grow up if her heart had had love in it. Now waiting for him when he was fifteen minutes late filled me with agony. Had I loved anyone or anything in my childhood and girlhood, what a thousand agonies there would have been every day! Maybe there were, and I had hidden them. Maybe that was why it hurt so now to love, and why my heart kept carrying on as if I were going to explode with pain and longing.

  I thought a great deal about him and other men. My lover was a strong individual. I don’t mean he was dominant. A strong man doesn’t have to be dominant toward a woman. He doesn’t match his strength against a woman weak with love for him. He matches it against the world.

  When he came into my room and took me in his arms all my troubles were forgotten. I even forgot Norma Jean, and her eyes stopped looking out of mine. I even forgot about not being photogenic. A new me appeared in my skin—not an actress, not somebody looking for a world of bright colors. All the fame and color and genius I had dreamed of were in me. When he said “I love you” to me, it was better than a thousand critics calling me a great star.

  I tried to figure out what was so different about my life than before him. It was the same—no hopes, no prospects, all doors closed. The troubles were still there, every one of them, but they were like dust swept into a corner. There was one thing new—sex.

  Sex is a baffling thing when it doesn’t happen. I used to wake up in the morning, when I was married, and wonder if the whole world was crazy, whooping about sex all the time. It was like hearing all the time that stove polish was the greatest invention on earth.

  Then it dawned on me that people—other women—were different than me. They could feel things I couldn’t. And when I started reading books I ran into the words “frigid,” “rejected,” and “lesbian.” I wondered if I was all three of those things.

  A man who had kissed me once had said it was very possible I was a lesbian because I apparently had no response to males—meaning him. I didn’t contradict him because I didn’t know what I was. There were times even when I didn’t feel human and times when all I could think of was dying. There was also the sinister fact that a well-made woman had always thrilled me to look at.

  Now, having fallen in love, I knew what I was. It wasn’t a lesbian. The world and its excitement over sex didn’t seem crazy. In fact, it didn’t seem crazy enough.

  There was only one cloud in my paradise, and it kept growing. At first nothing had mattered to me except my own love. After a few months I began to look at his love. I looked, listened, and looked, and I couldn’t tell myself more than he told me. I couldn’t tell if he really loved me.

  He grinned a lot when we were together and kidded me a lot. I knew he liked me and was happy to be with me. But his love didn’t seem anything like mine. Most of his talk to me was a form of criticism. He criticized my mind. He kept pointing out how little I knew and how unaware of life I was. It was sort of true. I tried to know more by reading books. I had a new friend, Natasha Lytess. She was an acting coach and a woman of deep culture. She told me what to read. I read Tolstoy and Turgenev. They excited me, and I couldn’t lay a book down till I’d finished it. And I would go around dreaming of all the characters I’d read and hearing them talk to each other. But I didn’t feel that my mind was improving.

  I never complained about his criticism, but it hurt me. His cynicism hurt me, too.

  I’d say, “I’ve never felt like this before.”

  And he’d answer, “You will, again.”

  “I don’t know,” I’d say. “I just know that this is everything.”

  He’d answer, “You mustn’t take a few sensations so seriously.” Then he’d ask, “What’s most important in life to you?”

  “You are,” I’d say.

  “After I’m gone,” he’d smile.

  I’d cry.

  “You cry too easily,” he’d say. “That’s because your mind isn’t developed. Compared to your breasts it’s embryonic.” I couldn’t contradict him because I had to look up that word in a dictionary. “Your mind is inert,” he’d say. “You never think about life. You just float through it on that pair of water wings you wear.”

  Alone, I would lie awake repeating all he’d said. I’d think, “He can’t love me or he wouldn’t be so conscious of my faults. How can he love me if I’m such a goof to him?”

  I didn’t mind being a goof if only he loved me. I felt when we were together that I walked in the gutter and he on the sidewalk. All I did was keep looking up to see if there was love in his eyes.

  We were in my room one night, and he started talking about our future.

  “I’ve thought of us getting married,” he said, “but I’m afraid it’s impossible.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It would be all right for me,” he said, “but I keep thinking of my son. If we were married and anything should happen to me—such as my dropping dead—it would be very bad for him.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It wouldn’t be right for him to be brought up by a woman like you,” he said. “It would be unfair to him.”

  After he left, I cried all night, not over what he had said but over what I had to do. I had to leave him.

  The moment I thought it, I realized I’d known it for a long time. That’s why I’d been sad—and desperate. That’s why I had tried to make myself more and more beautiful for him, why I had clung to him as if I were half mad. Because I had known it was ending.

  He didn’t love me. A man can’t love a woman for whom he feels half contempt. He can’t love her if his mind is ashamed of her.

  When I saw him again the next day I said good-bye to him. He stood staring at me while I told him how I felt. I cried, sobbed, and ended up in his arms.

  But a week later I said good-bye again. This time I walked out of his house with my head up. Two days later I was back. There were a third and fourth good-bye. But it was like rushing to the edge of a roof to jump off. I stopped each time and didn’t jump, and turned to him and begged him to hold me. It’s hard to do something that hurts your heart, especially when it’s a new heart and you think that one hurt may kill it.

  Finally I left him, and two days passed and I was still away. I sat in my room watching myself.

  “Stick it out another day,” I’d say. “The hurt’s getting less already.”

  It wasn’t, but I stuck it out a third and fourth day. Then he came after me. He knocked on my door. I walked to the door and leaned against it.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Please let me in,” he said.

  I didn’t answer. He started banging on the door. When I heard him banging, I knew I was through with my love affair. I knew I was over it. The pain was still there but it would go away.

  “Please,” he kept saying, “I want to talk to you.”

  “I don’t want to see you,” I said. “Please go away.”

  He raised his voice and banged harder.

  “But you’re mine,” he cried at me. “You can’t leave me out here.”

  The neighbors opened their doors. One of them yelled she’d call the police if he didn’t quit making a disturbance.

  He went away.

  He came back again—as I had done before. He loved me now. He met me in the street and walked beside me pouring his heart out. But it didn’t mean anything. When his hand gripped my arm, my arm didn’t buzz, my heart didn’t leap.

  17

  i buy a present

  During the time I loved this man, I kept looking for work. I had forgotten about my “career.” I looked for work because I thought he would love me more if I were employed. I felt it made him a little nervous to have me just sitting around and doing nothing but wait for him. A man sometimes gets guilty and angry if you love him too much.

  Besides I was broke. I was living on money I could borrow.

>   Someone I met at a lunch counter told me they were making retakes on a movie called Love Happy and needed a girl for a bit part. Harpo and Groucho Marx were in the movie.

  I went on the set and found the producer Lester Cowan in charge. He was a small man with dark, sad eyes. He introduced me to Groucho and Harpo Marx. It was like meeting familiar characters out of Mother Goose. There they were with the same happy, crazy look I had seen on the screen. They both smiled at me as if I were a piece of French pastry.

  “This is the young lady for the office bit,” said Mr. Cowan.

  Groucho stared thoughtfully at me.

  “Can you walk?” he demanded.

  I nodded.

  “I am not referring to the type of walking my Tante Zippa has mastered,” said Groucho. “This role calls for a young lady who can walk by me in such a manner as to arouse my elderly libido and cause smoke to issue from my ears.”

  Harpo honked a horn at the end of his cane and grinned at me.

  I walked the way Groucho wanted.

  “Exceedingly well done,” he beamed.

  Harpo’s horn honked three times, and he stuck his fingers in his mouth and blew a piercing whistle.

  “Walk again,” said Mr. Cowan.

  I walked up and down in front of the three men. They stood grinning.

  “It’s Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one,” said Groucho. “We shoot the scene tomorrow morning. Come early.”

  “And don’t do any walking in any unpoliced areas,” said Harpo.

  I played the next day; Groucho directed me. It was hardly more than a walk-on, but Mr. Cowan, the producer, said I had the makings of a star and that he was going to do something about it right away.

  When you’re broke and a nobody and a man tells you that, he becomes a genius in your eyes. But nothing happened for a week. I sat every evening listening to my lover argue about my various shortcomings, and I remained blissfully happy.

  Then one morning I found my name in the headline of Louella Parsons’ movie column in the Los Angeles Examiner. I was so excited I fell out of bed. The headline said Lester Cowan had put me under contract to star in a forthcoming movie.

  That was something to read! I dressed and made up quicker than a fireman and squandered my last two dollars on a taxi.

  Mr. Cowan was in his office.

  “What can I do for you, Miss Monroe?” he inquired. He always spoke like a gentleman.

  “I would like to sign the contract,” I said, “that I read about in Miss Louella Parsons’ column.”

  “I haven’t drawn it up yet,” Mr. Cowan smiled. “It will take a while.”

  “How much are you going to pay me?” I asked. Mr. Cowan said he hadn’t decided on a figure yet.

  “A hundred dollars a week will be enough,” I said.

  “We’ll see about it,” Mr. Cowan replied. “You just go home and wait till you hear from me. I’ll send for you.”

  “Your word of honor?” I asked.

  “Word of honor,” Mr. Cowan said solemnly.

  I borrowed two dollars from a friend I knew sort of and hurried off to a jewelry store. I had never given my lover a present of any kind, due to my financial condition. Now I saw a chance to get him something beautiful.

  I showed the man in the jewelry store the headline in Louella Parsons’ column and my picture in it.

  “I’m Marilyn Monroe,” I said. “You can compare me to the photograph.”

  “I can see you are,” the jeweler agreed.

  “I haven’t any money now,” I said. “In fact I have less than two dollars in the world. But you can see from what it says in Miss Parsons’ column that I am on my way to stardom and will soon receive a great deal of money from Mr. Cowan.”

  The jeweler nodded.

  “Of course, I haven’t signed the contract yet, or even seen it.” I didn’t want him to misunderstand anything. “And Mr. Cowan, whom I just saw, said it would take a while—but I thought perhaps you might trust me. I want to buy a present for someone very dear to me.”

  The man smiled and said he would trust me and that I could pick out anything in the store.

  I picked out an object that cost five hundred dollars and ran to my lover’s home and waited for him.

  He was quite overcome by the beauty of my present. Nobody had ever given him such an expensive object before.

  “But you haven’t engraved it,” he said. “From Marilyn to ___________ with love. Or something like that.”

  My heart almost stopped as he said this.

  “I was going to have it engraved,” I answered, “but changed my mind.”

  “Why?” he asked. He looked very tenderly at me.

  “Because you’ll leave me someday,” I said, “and you’ll have some other girl to love. And thus you wouldn’t be able to use my present if my name was on it. This way you can always use it, as if it were something you’d bought yourself.”

  Usually when a woman says that sort of thing to her lover she expects to be contradicted and soothed out of her fears. I didn’t. At night I lay in bed and cried. To love without hope is a sad thing for the heart.

  It took me two years to pay the jeweler the five hundred dollars. By the time I had paid the last twenty-five dollar installment, my lover was married to another woman.

  18

  i see the world

  Mr. Cowan kept his word and sent for me. He wasn’t ready to use me as a star, seeing he had no picture to put me in. But he would like to engage me to exploit the movie Love Happy.

  “But I don’t know how to exploit a picture,” I said.

  “You don’t have to know,” Mr. Cowan replied. “All you have to do is to be Marilyn Monroe.”

  He explained that I would travel from city to city, put up in the finest hotels, meet the press, give out interviews, and pose for photographers.

  “You will have a chance to see the world,” Mr. Cowan said, “and it will broaden your horizons.”

  I agreed to exploit the picture, and Mr. Cowan agreed to pay all my traveling expenses and give me a salary of a hundred dollars a week.

  One of the reasons I accepted the job was that I thought it would make my lover realize how much he loved me—if I went away for a few weeks. He didn’t seem to be able to realize it with me hanging around twenty-four hours a day. I had read that men love you more if they can be made a little uncertain about owning you. But reading something is one thing, doing it is quite another. Besides, I could never pretend to feel something I didn’t feel. I could never make love if I didn’t love, and if I loved I could no more hide the fact than change the color of my eyes.

  The day before I left for New York to start the Love Happy exploitation tours of the U.S.A. I suddenly realized that I had almost no wardrobe. I called on Mr. Cowan and told him about this.

  “I won’t be much of an advertisement in one old suit,” I said.

  Mr. Cowan smiled and agreed I had better have a larger wardrobe. He gave me seventy-five dollars to outfit myself for the tour. I rushed over to the May Company store and bought three woolen suits for twenty-five dollars apiece.

  I bought the woolen suits because I remembered that New York and Chicago were in the North. I had seen them in the movies blanketed with snow. In my excitement over going to see these great cities for the first time I forgot it was summertime there as well as in Los Angeles.

  On the way to New York I made plans of all the things I would see.

  My lover had always said, one of the reasons you have nothing to talk about is you’ve never been anywhere or seen anything.

  I was going to remedy that.

  When the train stopped in New York I could hardly breathe, it was so hot. It was hotter than I had ever known it to be in Hollywood. The woolen suit made me feel as if I was wearing an oven.

  Mr. Cowan’s press agent, who was supervising my exploitation trip, rose to the situation.

  “We must make capital out of what we have,” he explained. So he arranged
for me to pose on the train steps with perspiration running down my face and an ice cream cone in each hand.

  The caption for the pictures read: “Marilyn Monroe, the hottest thing in pictures, cooling off.”

  That “cooling off” idea became sort of the basis for my exploitation work.

  A half hour after arriving in New York I was led into an elegant suite in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and told to put on a bathing suit.

  More photographers arrived and took more pictures of me “cooling off.”

  I spent several days in New York looking at the walls of my elegant suite and the little figures of people fifteen stories below. All sorts of people came to interview me, not only newspapers and magazine reporters but exhibitors and other exploitation people from United Artists.

  I asked questions about the Statue of Liberty and what were the best shows to see and the most glamorous cafés to go to. But I saw nothing and went nowhere.

  Finally I got so tired of sitting around perspiring in one of my three woolen suits, that I complained.

  “It seems to me,” I said to the United Artists’ representatives who were having dinner with me in my suite, “that I ought to have something more attractive to wear in the evening.”

  They agreed and bought me a cotton dress at a wholesale shop. It had a low-cut neck and blue polka dots. They explained, also, that cotton was much more chic in the big cities than silk. I did like the red velvet belt that came with it.

  The next stop was Detroit, and then Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Rockford. It was the same story in each of them. I was taken to a hotel, rushed into a bathing suit, given a fan and photographers arrived. The hottest thing in pictures was cooling off again.

  In Rockford I decided that I had seen enough of the world. Also, due to my moving around continually and to the confusion this seemed to arouse in Mr. Cowan’s bookkeeping department, I had not received any salary whatsoever. The salary, it was explained to me, would be waiting for me at the next stop. As a result I didn’t have fifty cents to spend on myself during my grand tour.